"If you want to feel better about not being perfect and see the potential upside in your errors, read Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz ... a brilliant book with a sweeping grasp of philosophy and physics and all points in between." —President Bill Clinton

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The Author

Kathryn Schulz is a journalist and author. She is the book critic for New York Magazine; her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker,TheNew York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, TIME Magazine, the Boston Globe, the "Freakonomics" blog of The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications. In 2012, she won the National Book Critic Circle's Nona Balakian Prize for Excellence in Reviewing. She is the former editor of the online environmental magazine Grist, and a former reporter and editor for The Santiago Times, of Santiago, Chile, where she covered environmental, labor, and human rights issues. She was a 2004 recipient of the Pew Fellowship in International Journalism (now the International Reporting Project), and has reported from throughout Central and South America, Japan, and, most recently, the Middle East. A graduate of Brown University and a former Ohioan, Oregonian, and Brooklynite, she currently lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

Photo by: Dmitri Kasterine

We’ve all done it: hollered a confident “hi, Mark!” to a guy named Greg; slipped up and called our sixth grade teacher “Mom”; snuck up on our sister from behind and delivered a pinch, only to realize she was a stranger. These kinds of gaffes are simultaneously the most mundane and most embarrassing of mistakes. More people than I can count told me stories like these, all of which ended with the speaker expressing the fervent desire to vanish. As one such person put it, “The only thing you can say in these situations is, ‘Sorry, I just had a brain biopsy.’”